Monthly Archive: August 2016

102

Frugal Hosting Ideas For Hanging Out With Friends

My fabulous, and fairly frugal, parents visited us here on the homestead last month and, while they were here, I put them to work brainstorming ideas to share on Frugalwoods. A few topics that did not make the cut: Why you should/should not water down your hand-soap. Very polarizing. Possibly marriage-ending. People have wildly divergent views about whether or not this leads to more soap use/more water use. For the sake of family unity, best to leave this...

66

Frugality Is Not Deferred Spending

Frugality is not a hardship. It also doesn’t take a ton of time. And actually? It makes life easier. Frugality Is Not Deferred Spending I’ve had quite a few readers ask me lately how they should stay motivated to stick with frugality until they reach their longterm goals, which might be decades away. And my answer is that you don’t. You can’t. Because effective frugality doesn’t have an end date. If it did, then all of...

78

This Month On The Homestead: Of Berries and People

If you’re just tuning in, this is a new series in which I plan to document each month of our lives out here on our 66-acre Vermont homestead. After leaving urban Cambridge, MA to chart this wholly different life, we’re experiencing a constant learning curve of exploration! Check out last month’s iteration of the series here. We reveled in summertime bounty during the month of July! Now several months into our tenure here on the homestead, Mr. Frugalwoods...

107

Airfare! And Other July 2016 Expenditures

It was a relief to see our expenses dip back down into the territory of normal this month. I find there’s invariably an expense burst surrounding a move–and especially a move to a completely different way of life! Our sojourn from urban to rural continues to unfold, but it seems our relocation spending has started to abate. Quotidian categories such as groceries, household supplies, and gasoline all wended their way down, down, down in a...

138

What Does A Frugal Person Eat?

Food, glorious food! By far the most hotly requested topic for me to cover (via my query to our Frugalwoods Facebook group) was: food! I had no idea you all were so interested in what we eat! But the more I got to thinking about food (not hard for me to do), I realized that food plays an interesting, and sometimes divisive, role in our broader society and in the lives of those charting a frugal...